Links for Tuesday, September 27th, 2005: Backbase, passionate users, XML + UTF8, Learning Spanish

• Backbase – Library for the creation of Rich Internet Applications. This looks like a complete set of UI abstractions; not an add-on that is meant to be crowbarred into an existing application. For example, open up the BBGoogle demo and take a peek at the source. The main application is encapsulated within a single main.xml file. There’s a bunch of declarative XML inside, combined with a few standard HTML tags like div and h2. There’s a lot of detailed info on the programming model inside of the Backbase Explorer.
• Creating Passionate Users: Subvert from Within. There’s a career’s worth of great ideas in this post. I love this one: Always ask the question “How does this help the user kick ass?” Kathy was a guest speaker at Amazon last week. I was in San Diego and didn’t get to hear her talk..
• Life in the USA is kind of like a user’s manual for the United States, targeted at immigrants and at existing immigrants. There’s a lot inside, take some snacks with you!
• IBM developerWorks: Encode your XML documents in UTF-8. Stuff that every developer should know.
• Podcast: Trying to Learn Spanish. I’ve been looking for something like this for a while.